Hadoop: Your Partner in Crime

Pre-crime? Pretty close…

If you have seen the futuristic movie Minority Report, you most likely have an idea of how many factors and decisions go into crime prevention. Yes, Pre-crime is an aspect of the future but even today it is clear that many social, economic, psychological, racial, and geographical circumstances must be thoroughly considered in order to make crime prediction even partially possible and accurate. The predictive analytics made possible with Apache Hadoop can significantly benefit this area of government security.

The essence of crime prevention is to understand and narrow down thousands of “what if” cases to a manageable and plausible handful of scenarios. Crime can happen anywhere and can be categorized as anything from cyber fraud to kidnapping, which provides a lot of combinations for possible misdemeanors or felonies. With the help of big data analytics, government agencies can zone in on certain areas, demographics, and age groups to pick out specific types of crimes and move towards decreasing the one trillion dollar annual cost of crime in the United States.

Zach Friend, a crime analyst for the Santa Cruz Police Department, explained that there aren’t enough cops on the streets due to insufficient funds. Not only that, but many police departments are still technologically behind in the crime-monitoring field, so big data analytics tools could be a huge step forward for police all over the country. Evidence and information about cases could be stored much more efficiently, police action could be more proactive, and crime awareness could be much more prevalent.

Who’s on the case?

The Crime and Corruption Observatory (created by the European company, FuturICT) is pushing for this kind of development and aims to predict the dynamics of criminal phenomena by running massive data mining and large-scale computer simulations. The Observatory is structured as a network that involves scientists from varying fields – “from cognitive and social science to criminology, from artificial intelligence to complexity science, from statistics to economics and psychology”.

This Observatory will be used through the framework of the developing Living Earth Simulator project – “a big data and supercomputing project that will attempt to uncover the underlying sociological and psychological laws that underpin human civilization.” The project, funded by the European Union, is an impressive advancement in technology, which will not only aid in pin pointing crime but will also effectively utilize the big data of today’s world.

PredPol has made predictive crime analytics available to police departments so that “pre-crime”, in a sense, could be put into action. Zach Friend explains, “We’re facing a situation where we have 30 percent more calls for service but 20 percent less staff than in the year 2000, and that is going to continue to be our reality. So we have to deploy our resources in a more effective way. This model does that.” PredPol allows law enforcement agencies to collect and organize data about crimes that have already happened and to use this data to predict future incidents in certain areas at a radius of 500 square foot blocks. It may not be the same as knowing the exact perpetrator, victim, and cause of the crime ahead of time as was possible in Minority Report but it is an impressive step towards perfecting crime prediction.

The Santa Cruz Police Department, which is using PredPol’s software, has already seen significant improvements in police work. SCPD began by locating areas of possible burglaries, battery, and assault and handing out maps of these areas to officers so they could patrol them. Since then, the department has seen a 19% decrease in these types of crimes.

PredPol software is able to make calculations about crimes based on previous times and locations of other incidents while cross-referencing these with criminal behavior and patterns. Here is an example of how large-scale this could get: George Mohler, a UCLA mathematician who was testing the effectiveness of PredPol, looked at 5,000 crimes which required 5,000! comparisons (i.e. 5,000 x 4,999 x 4,998…). With impressive results already materializing from calculations like these, it is exciting to think how much more accurate predictive crime analytics could become.

Hadoop lays down the law

With Apache Hadoop, perfecting crime prevention becomes an attainable goal. CTOlabs presented some very important points in a recent white paper about big data and law enforcement, showing how Hadoop could be beneficial to smaller police departments that don’t have very much financial leeway. The LAPD for example, is very well-funded and can afford to work with companies such as IBM to develop crime predicting techniques.

Smaller or less advanced departments, however, do not have the financial advantage to use supercomputers or extensive command centers and will use less efficient techniques (such as simple spreadsheets and homegrown databases) to keep track of all of the information involved in law enforcement. “Nationwide, agencies and departments have to reduce their resources and even their manpower but are expected to continue the trend of a decreasing crime rate. To do so requires better service with fewer resources.” Open source presents an extremely effective and less expensive option – Apache Hadoop is the super hero that can save the day, one cluster at a time.

With Hadoop’s capability to store and organize data, police departments can filter through unnecessary information in order to focus on the aspects of crime that are more important. By applying advanced analytics to historical crime patterns, weather trends, traffic sensor data, and a wealth of other sources, police can place patrol cops in areas with higher crime probability instead of evenly distributing man power throughout quiet and dangerous neighborhoods. This conserves money, effort, and time. Hadoop can also help organize a number of other factors such as police back up, calls for service, or screening for biases and confounding variables. Phone calls, videos, historical records, suspect profiles, or any other important information that is necessary for law agencies to keep for a long time can be systematized and referenced whenever need be.

Increasing public safety through effective use of technology is not a panacea but it is here and is an effective tool in combating crime. Apache Hadoop serves as a foundation for this new approach and, most importantly, it is accessible to a wider range of police departments all over the country and the world. Yes, predictive policing and crime prevention still have a lot of room for development and have yet to tackle issues like specific crimes that depend on interpersonal relationships or random events. However, it is all very possible, especially with the use of Hadoop as a predictive analytics platform. Crime can be stopped. No PreCogs necessary.